What is the new language adequate to our contemporary lived condition? How can we articulate the unprecedented, the unarticulated, the scalar unthinkable and unimaginable?
How can we write under the shadow of planetary extinction? What contemporary writers are doing this best? Who and what are they drawing upon? Did those inspirations and influences tackle similar catastrophic conditions or ideas? How did they find the language to articulate these encounters? For today’s writer, what is the most usable, needful language for unimaginability?
My BrownGirl religious heritage, Classical Hinduism, is chockfull of scenarios of planetary, or cosmic annihilation. Just read the Bhagavad Gita. Announcing Apocalypse with a Silver Lining. Live and Die in the Mouth of the Blue-skinned God, Krishna.
I mean, I always try to be wary of broad statements that suggest we are somehow special, different, remarkable, compared to previous ages. My own knowledge and study suggest otherwise. The world has always been gripped by equal parts anomie and agony. But those agonies and anomie were of other generations. They fought their fights.
This is our fight. But what is this fight? What is the exact nature of our fight? Some of it is against a distinct possibility and the fear of mass extinction. In the past, that fear has usually been articulated in religious language. Millenarians, Topknotters, the Blue-Eyed God, the Horsemen of the apocalypse, End of Days.
But for us, that language is broken (certainly for me it is). The closest analog for us is…what?… The fearless Manifestos of Technology?… Hopping off to Mars?… Cybernetics?… Robotics?… The Singularity?…
The Metaverse???? I rest my case.
Doesn’t cut it, as you can see, against the Mouth of the Blue-Eyed God stuff. So, without a common language for our current crisis, what do we do with our anomie and agony?